Chapter 51: Open Your Heart

“So you’re saying this is their base.”

“Yes.”

Vera Bellastra, walking ahead, replied to Yu Ji-hye in a flat tone, but an undeniable thrill trembled in her voice.

Wizard in Violet, Bistour Blanc, Vera Bellastra, and Coral Echoes were walking through a vast expanse of ruins.

It was a place completely destroyed, flattened, and scorched by a single monster a year ago, where thousands of residents had all died.

Human footsteps had ceased, and there were no plans for cleanup or reconstruction.

It remained a literal wasteland, littered with piles of rubble and fragments of rotten wood.

“Keeheehee, the Demon King’s army, what a ridiculously grand name. Just a shabby group buried in futile superstitions.”

Buoyed by the anticipation of annihilating the demons, Vera abandoned even her pretense in front of Blanc and spoke in a mocking tone.

Subduing the demons was so easy it felt anticlimactic.

There was some civilian damage, but it was on a much smaller scale than initially anticipated.

According to Coral Echoes’ analysis, they had succeeded in exterminating almost all the demons in the metropolitan area in less than a week.

The demons that hadn’t died yet had either fled or hidden deeper, trembling and waiting for the day Vera Bellastra would find them. It was one of the two.

Yu Ji-hye’s assessment was that the organization, planned to operate the Fallen Magical Girl Special Task Force, or rather the Sanguine Obsidia Special Task Force, had been effective when almost entirely repurposed.

The method was highly effective: police information, civilian witness reports, and military magic radar data were collected from all over the Gyeonggi Province area where high concentrations of a specific magic pattern indicated the presence of demons.

Coral Echoes’ unique magic was then used to track the magic traces and calculate a rough location.

After that, magical girls dispersed to various locations would find and eliminate the enemies’ hideouts before they could commit acts of terror.

‘That’s what Vera Bellastra and the Committee would think.’

The power of a low-level monster, dismissed as ‘mere,’ couldn’t affect city functions or harm national defense, but it could kill dozens or hundreds of civilians and destroy dozens of houses before a magical girl arrived.

Yu Ji-hye, while thinking it was unavoidable due to a lack of manpower, had long grown weary of the Committee’s attitude of tolerating such civilian damage.

In any case, the feared threat of the demons was gone, and all that remained was to find and eliminate the headquarters of the leadership,

the so-called ‘Demon King’s army’ executives, or in other words, the ringleaders giving orders to the cell-based terrorists.

“The filth of them, opening their mouths after a brief interrogation, selling out their comrades, and begging for their lives!”

With an ecstatic and vile laugh, Vera joyfully spread her arms, as if paying tribute to the death of the demons.

Unlike the other three who walked quietly, she was practically flying, flapping her mechanical wings and dancing around. Blanc was starting to look uncomfortable with her.

Vera Bellastra had personally interrogated more than ten captured demons.

Some had multiple limbs, some had purple skin, and some had three pairs of eyes, but they all begged for their lives and died at Vera’s hands.

And the information they all gave was the same.

The location where their ‘superiors’ who gave them instructions, the magic power to command monsters, and the lower-level monsters to command were hiding was this very ruin.

Whether it was a mere underling or a true leader-level figure was unknown,

But Coral Echoes had detected the presence of a demon here, so the information obtained from the interrogation was not wrong.

The problem was,

“It’s too wide here.”

As Yu Ji-hye said, the village, once a complex web of dozens, hundreds of single-family homes, villas, and apartments with intricate alleys, had been completely destroyed and turned into a tomb of debris.

It was too vast.

The opponent was skilled enough at hiding to have not been caught until now, so even with Coral Echoes’ ability, they could only determine the approximate location and direction.

To find them, they would have to search the entire ruin piece by piece.

“Hmm… this place is definitely.”

Blanc, who had been tapping her golden trumpet-gun on her palm while pondering something, finally seemed to recall.

Yu Ji-hye, a non-combatant, had tried to stop her from going to the field, but Blanc had insisted, arguing that she hadn’t had a turn for a whole week.

She had brandished her trumpet-gun, her spirit weapon that she had cherished for 17 years and used to defeat hundreds of monsters, and persuaded Yu Ji-hye to allow her to accompany them.

As a result, she was in a very good mood.

“Ah! Right. The incident a year ago.

A year ago, a monster appeared and a whole town vanished, but the monster vanished too, and in the end, no one knew who defeated it.

There was that mysterious case, remember?”

“Ah.”

Why hadn’t anyone thought of this?

Yu Ji-hye retraced her memories.

A monster estimated to be at least H3 class from the magic traces left in the ruins, with enough magic power to potentially destroy a city, and presumed to be of a corresponding size.

Such a monster had destroyed a town and was defeated and killed by someone, and to this day, no one knew who that someone was.

If that someone had died here, there should have been some kind of trace, be it a body, magic, or something else.

Besides, the day after that incident was…

“The day Sanguine Obsidia first appeared.”

At Coral Echoes’ words, all four of them stopped walking.

“In the downtown area, I remember the day Sanguine Obsidia first appeared and murdered someone was the day after that incident.

Until now, the connection between the two incidents has not been considered…

But if we think that after making a contract in this town and becoming a magical girl, she defeated the monster and for some reason went into a berserk state, and then went on to kill hundreds of people for the next month, the story makes sense.

The evidence is thin, though.”

It didn’t explain Sanguine Obsidia’s obsession with murder and her psychological state, but as a hypothesis about her origin, it was a plausible story.

Her origins, of a girl who suddenly appeared and rampaged for the first month, slaughtering numerous people and magical girls without rhyme or reason, were still unknown.

“Let’s proceed with the search first. There might be things we didn’t find in the investigation a year ago.”

It was a sorry tale for the demon who was hiding here, hoping the magical girls would return empty-handed, but a barrier had already been erected to make it difficult for them to escape this area, and to detect them if they did.

It was a brutish but effective strategy: following Vera Bellastra’s opinion that such a drastic measure was necessary to capture an elusive enemy in a short period,

They had used a vast amount of magic power to set up Yu Ji-hye’s barrier, sealing off the entire area so the demon couldn’t escape, and then combing through it.

“Then, as I mentioned beforehand, I will take command from the rearmost position.

The three of you, please maintain your distance and drive the enemy in the direction of the coordinates I’ve given you.”

Coral Echoes said, stroking the string of the blue greatbow she had taken out.

A white uniform like a naval officer’s and a bow, a combination that seemed to fit and not fit at the same time, but it was a spirit weapon she was fond of because she could use her abilities to snipe monsters.

***

“Found~ you! Keeheehee.”

Vera, with a crimson halo above her head, smiled innocently and silently deviated from her path.

She went behind a wall that had miraculously maintained its shape and dragged a man out of a basement.

He had the physique of a well-built muscular man, but his skin was blue, and a large horn protruded from his forehead.

He was a demon.

The demon, finally facing the inevitable result of being caught sooner or later, was trembling all over, his teeth chattering.

“You’re the ringleader, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re not. What I have to do and what you have to endure will be the same anyway.”

Vera’s beaming smile held a terrifying air that made even the gentle Blanc and the expressionless Echoes shudder and avoid her.

“There seems to be no evidence of other demons in this area. As initially observed, this one is all there is.”

“Even if he has hidden comrades, he’ll soon be telling us with his own mouth.”

The demon, bound by a pink, glowing whip and dragged by the horn by Vera, remained silent, letting out only unintelligible groans with a face full of terror.

It didn’t matter if he couldn’t speak now.

Once he was in Vera’s clutches, he would soon spill all the information he knew.

For the ringleader of the monsters that had briefly shaken the nation, it was an anticlimactic end.

“Wait, there’s a strange presence.”

Geyser Lamda suddenly spoke to Yu Ji-hye, who had stayed behind to look around one last time by herself.

Like other spirits who didn’t interact well with anything other than their contracted magical girl, be it people or things, Geyser didn’t pay much attention to his surroundings.

The things he was interested in, unless Yu Ji-hye brought them up first, were only related to the whereabouts of other spirits.

Specifically, only things related to the death of a spirit.

“No way.”

“Over there, about 50 meters ahead.”

A point that looked like it was in the middle of a villa complex, judging by the brick fragments, the size of the open space, and the layout of the ruins.

“I can feel the traces of a spirit’s corpse here. I’m not sure. It could be a fragment of a damaged spirit.”

“Is there a possibility it’s related to the incident a year ago?”

“It seems a considerable amount of time has passed since the trace was created, but I can’t specify the time.”

Yu Ji-hye was lost in thought.

A spirit fragment… it’s like a severed body part, so to speak, of a spirit that has overused its power or been attacked.

If a spirit fragment or corpse was here, it meant that something of that magnitude had happened.

“The contractor lacked the power to defeat the monster, so she drew on the spirit’s power?

It’s plausible if she made a magical girl contract in a desperate situation, but it doesn’t explain the contractor’s disappearance.

If the contractor fought the spirit after defeating the monster, that is, if that contractor is a fallen magical girl, the possibility is higher, but…”

She tried to piece together a story, for now excluding the possibility that that person was Sanguine Obsidia, but a coherent and plausible narrative couldn’t be formed.

“Subduing a spirit and killing a spirit are on different levels.”

“Yes, Geyser.

Even if she has outstanding potential, a novice who has just made a contract wouldn’t know how to kill a spirit, nor would she be able to pour out enough magic power to do so.”

Though it might be different if it were Sanguine Obsidia.

Yu Ji-hye didn’t bother to say that out loud.

The speculation that Sanguine Obsidia intentionally killed her mascot as soon as she made a contract was also an unreasonable conjecture.

Fallen magical girls often subdue their mascots and use them as magic batteries and control devices, and considering Sanguine Obsidia’s precise magic control ability shown from the beginning.

It was reasonable to assume she was using her mascot like a mechanical device.

In the first place, the major premise itself was just a conjecture based on the fact that the incident in this town and the appearance of Sanguine Obsidia coincided.

It was a story that the annoying conspiracy theorists, who still showed up near the Association from time to time to protest, would love.

“My thoughts have only gotten more complicated.”

There was no way to analyze the trace, which wasn’t even certain to be a spirit’s corpse, and she couldn’t ask a group of madmen like the Apostle Society.

Thinking that she now had one more thing to confirm when she caught Sanguine Obsidia, Yu Ji-hye left the place.

Once the cleanup was finished, she planned to immediately use the system established through this incident to capture Sanguine Obsidia.

Whether it’s the Apostle Society or monsters, there will be no more useless interruptions.

“I’ll be facing Sanguine Obsidia soon, so I can just ask her then.”

Though it would be an interrogation at a grim execution site, surrounded by dozens of magical girls and hundreds of heavily armed police forces,

Not a peaceful conversation over a cup of tea and a plate of cookies.